#64: De-emphasised vs. imposed unevenness
Section 7: Antonin Dvořák – String Quartet Op.51, ii: Dumka
We often had to think consciously about playing sufficiently unevenly, and required frequent reminders until the very end of the experimental process. (We never felt we were going beyond the original recording, in the extent of our inégale). This is not because we would always ‘play exactly evenly’ in our native style – that is surely an unhelpful caricature of contemporary performance. The real challenge was not just in automating that irregularity to the same extent as the Czech Quartet, but to do so while remaining sufficiently flexible and responsive. For instance, our violist noticed that her ‘natural’ expressive response in b.20 (beat 1) would be to linger on the last semiquaver (Bb) of the four – the melodic high point; and that she was also doing this when playing inégale, which ended up stretching the bar as a whole. The Czech Quartet did not do this, which heightened our sense that the task would not simply involve ‘applying’ unevenness more consistently, but that we needed to re-evaluate our whole understanding of musical context in light of an underlying inégale convention.
